This invention deals generally with testing and calibrating equipment and more specifically with calibrating respiratory therapy equipment and checking it for electrical safety.
The sophistication of hospital care has increased immensely in recent years, and while most large hospitals have a considerable inventory of equipment to aid patients, the typical health care facility does not have either the staff or equipment to assure continued accuracy of that vital equipment.
When an industrial installation has as much equipment as a hospital respiratory therapy department, it has a regular program of calibration of all equipment and a considerable staff to carry it out. But despite a vital need for accuracy in the medical field, the methods of verifying the accuracy of life saving respiratory equipment have not kept pace with the equipment itself.
Virtually every parameter is presently tested by a separate piece of calibration equipment. Moreover, the calibration equipment is slow in operation, bulky, costly and complex. This is generally because the equipment presently in use is essentially designed similar to primary standards. Air volume is, for instance, checked by actually displacing a measurable volume enclosed within an expanding cylinder.
The essential need in the field of respiratory therapy is for a fast, accurate means of calibrating all the various parameters normally measured, with an apparatus which is simple enough and dependable enough for any operator to achieve reliable results with minimum training. Moreover, since a device with faulty wiring can cause serious injury or death to a patient, there exists an important need for a device to check the electrical safety criterion of all respiratory therapy equipment on a regular basis.